Ian Budgen interview part 2

On headsail trimming a Cup boat and the structure of GBR Challenge's sailmaking team

Read part one of this interview here

The headsail trimmer on the GBR Challenge race boat trims one side of the boat through the pre-start sequence, the other side being taken by the downwind trimmer. After the start the headsail trimmer trims on both tacks. Through the tacks the upwind trimmer does the let off and the downwind trimmer tails, then the upwind trimmer takes over. On the approach to the topmark, the downwind trimmer takes the kite sheet and trims the chute downwind while the upwind trimmer is on the guy.

"It has been known for a trimmer to do everything - to do upwind and downwind sails - but that is quite exceptional these days," explains Budgen. "Normally you do have separate trimmers for each sail. The other way of doing it is for one trimmer to do one side of the boat or the other side of the boat, so one does starboard tack and the other does port tack, upwind and downwind. But we've split it upwind and downwind so that from tack to tack going upwind firstly the sail set-up is the same because you've got the same person doing it, plus you've got the standardisation of terminology, dealing with people, characters, just used to listening to their voices.

"And of course the same downwind: the trimmer is very much in control of what angle the boat sails at and the speed of the boat through the water because they are basically calling the pressure on the spinnaker to the helmsman and when you go from one gybe to the other gybe, you wouldn't want another person doing it, because you get used to how people communicate. You need the consistency of the people in order that they learn about the sails that they are trimming for one, they learn about how to make their sails perform to the best. Therefore the more time the specific people get doing that job, the better they are going to get at it."

Budgen's role as a headsail trimmer, goes beyond just being on the boat as he is also is heavily involved with developing headsails for GBR Challenge. While Chris Mason and Richard Sydenham work on mainsails, Toby Isles and Simon Fry are in charge of spinnakers and he and Chris Main look after headsails. North's Simon Fry runs the whole sail program."Within the sail department we all try to concentrate on our own sails. So I just concentrate on looking at and analysing all the headsail, and I'm not really involved in any of the mainsail or spinnaker discussions in any sort of in-depth level. We do all give input at a very general level to make sure they all match up and work together," explains Budgen.